The Olympic-size open-air swimming pool was erected on the west side of the road occupied these days by a filling station.
Imagine this extravagance if you can. At the height of industry in a time before the Clean Air Act was introduced: Smallthorne and Burslem skies filled with cloaks of black smoke and with choking dust trapped between Sneyd Colliery, Bellerton Colliery and the ironworks, not to mention the thousands of potbank chimneys spewing anthracite-black smoke into the atmosphere. Get the picture?
And so, what do the colliery owners do? Well they enterprisingly build a state of the art open air swimming pool with sun-bathing sections and underwater observation chambers. Now that’s innovation for you – or is it folly; for within a few months the pool was shut down, something to do with subsidence they said at the time as swimming pool water began seeping away. And perhaps it might have had something to do with swimmers coming from the water dirtier than when they plunged in.
The above is taken from thepotteries.org
Below are 3 images taken from the Warrillow Collection at Keele University and show the inside of the pool after it closed and fell into disrepair after November 1960.
Copyright Warrillow Collection, Keele University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission
Copyright Warrillow Collection, Keele University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission
Copyright Warrillow Collection, Keele University Library. Not to be reproduced without permission
